


The Season of the Heart (A Peterick Christmas Carol)

by wanderlustnostalgia



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alternate Universe - A Christmas Carol Fusion, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inspired by A Christmas Carol, M/M, Writer!Pete
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-15 17:25:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13035915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustnostalgia/pseuds/wanderlustnostalgia
Summary: Seven months ago, Patrick had terminated their business relationship.Two hours ago, he’d shown up at Pete’s door, armed with, of all things, a fucking casserole.--Eleven months after the commercial failure of his fourth novel, seven months after falling out with Patrick, and far too long since he last actually wrote, ex-bestselling novelist Pete Wentz receives five unexpected visitors.





	The Season of the Heart (A Peterick Christmas Carol)

**Author's Note:**

> I participated in a thing!!
> 
> Super-special thanks to laudanum_cafe (especially for coming up with the ghost-related shenanigans--you can credit them with Ghost!Saporta), PlatinumAndPercocet (for all their suggestions re: Peterick drama), and wr0ngsideofreality (for being a generally awesome cheerleader), without whom this fic probably would not exist beyond an idea in my head.
> 
> Have a very happy holidays, whatever you celebrate--and even if you don't, have a lovely New Year!
> 
> (Everyone mentioned in this fic: if you're reading this, I am very, very sorry. Please don't kill me.)

The apartment was cold.  Cold, and dim—Pete hadn’t paid his bills in over a month.  Whether that had been out of forgetfulness or just a general fuck-you to his landlord, he neither remembered nor cared.  At any rate, he was making do with an emergency flashlight and a six-pack of Christmas candles, swiped on his way out of a discount store yesterday morning.  Didn’t do much for the heat, but at least he wouldn’t kill himself tripping over old notebooks on the way to the bathroom.

Any other year and it might’ve been a little less cold, a little less dim, a little less lonely.  Life was fickle that way:  one moment you’re on a rooftop in downtown LA with your best friends, toasting your new book and your newer movie deal; then your book tanks, your movie deal falls through, and your best-friend-slash-literary agent storms out of your apartment with split knuckles and a bruise blossoming on his jaw, courtesy of your angry fist.

This last part, incidentally, was why Pete was spending Christmas Eve on his couch, in the dark, with a bottle of cheap liquor store bourbon.  Seven months ago, after three successful novels and a brand-spanking-new commercial failure never to be spoken of again, Patrick had terminated their business relationship.

Two hours ago, he’d shown up at Pete’s door, armed with, of all things, a fucking casserole.

At first he’d thought it had been a mistake.  The carolers were making their rounds, and the knock, firm but hesitant, might’ve been a young kid accustomed to knocking slowly.  But there was no mistaking the voice.  He’d know that voice anywhere (muffled, breathless, choked with rage); he knew how it sounded when it said his name; knew the way the lips shaped themselves around the word, like they fit; knew the thousands of various ways they _could_ say it.

(He knew, still, like the back of his goddamn hand.  He wished he didn’t.)

So after a moment’s hesitation, and a fair bit of arguing with himself, he let Patrick in, casserole and all.  “Thought you could use the warmth,” Patrick explained, at Pete’s puzzled frown.  His face was flushed, presumably from the cold, although the fact that Patrick couldn’t seem to maintain eye contact for more than two seconds suggested otherwise.  “Joe told me you were spending Christmas alone.”

 _Joe needs to keep his damn mouth shut,_ Pete thought, but he bit his tongue and put the casserole in the fridge anyway, wedged between a gallon of milk set to expire in two days and a half-eaten Starbucks sandwich because he couldn’t be bothered to go grocery shopping at eight o’clock on Christmas Eve.  Pathetic, to be sure, but Patrick didn’t comment, instead lingering awkwardly in the doorway and shoving his gloved hands in his pockets like he didn’t know what to do with them.

“Thought you were more of a pinot guy,” he said, with a significant glance at the bourbon.

Pete didn’t answer.  Small talk was just another form of stalling, and he knew better than to engage Patrick’s stalling.  He could go on for hours and never once get to what actually  _needed_ to be said.

Eventually, Patrick gave in.  “So listen,” he said, shifting nervously and staring at his boots.  “About...you know…I was thinking maybe we could start over?”

Behind the counter, Pete froze.  “What do you mean, _start over?”_

“Well, it’s just—we left off at such a bad place last time, and I keep going back to that and thinking, why did we end it there?  I mean, yeah, we fucked up a bunch, but it didn’t have to _end_ like that.”  Still not looking at Pete, Patrick walked over to the nearest bookshelf and scanned through the titles, running his finger across the spines.  “All those missteps, all those stupid mistakes—maybe they weren’t mistakes, you know?  Maybe they were—I don’t know— _signs,_ or something.  Opportunities, even.”

“Or maybe they just meant our luck ran out and we needed to be put back in our place.”  Pete shook his head.  He thought they’d exhausted all they could say on the subject seven months ago.  “Those ‘mistakes’ cost me my career, Patrick.  They weren’t just little fuck-ups you can come back from.”

“Still.  We don’t need to let them define us.”  Having come across a satisfactory title, Patrick hummed in agreement and plucked the book from the shelf.  “I mean, what’s that quote about how one door closes and another one opens?  We can’t keep dwelling on our mistakes, Pete.  Sooner or later we have to move on.”

As Patrick stood there, gripping the novel to his chest (it was fucking  _Vampire Money_ of all things, the bastard child of the Wentz bibliography itself), Pete’s attempts at remaining neutral crumbled to powder.  “So what are you saying?  That the past seven months don’t matter?  That after everything that’s happened, you show up with a fucking casserole and expect me to just forget about all of it?  Fuck you, Patrick.”

“Pete, calm down.  That’s not what I’m saying—”

“No, it’s over.  I’m done.  Thanks for the casserole, maybe now you can spend the next seven months trying to figure out where you went wrong and getting fucking nowhere.”

For a moment Patrick tensed, jaw tightening, and Pete wondered if he was getting ready to fire back, racking his brain for the words he knew would hurt Pete where it really mattered.  But then his shoulders drooped, and he sighed.

“Fine,” he said.  “I won’t force you to do anything.  But Pete, maybe next time you give up on yourself, think of all the other people you’re giving up on.”

Then he was gone, and Pete was alone.  Alone, still standing in his kitchen with a casserole sitting in his fridge and the ice from Patrick's boots melting on his doormat.  Already he regretted saying it, regretted pushing away Patrick’s attempts at reconciliation when he himself had barely made an effort, but the damage had already been done.

Afterward he didn’t have the energy to even unscrew the cap off the bottle, let alone drink the damn thing, so now he was slouched half-awake on his couch with the bourbon nestled snug against his chest and a marathon of old Christmas movies flashing across his TV screen.  The snow had been falling steadily for several hours, coating the window in a thick sheet of ice; the candles were slowly starting to burn out.  Pete was having trouble keeping his eyes open, and soon he’d reached that weird limbo-like state between asleep and awake, the TV a faint hum in the background, indistinguishable from the noises outside.

Eventually he drifted off, overcome by his exhaustion.  It was hard to believe there’d been a time he couldn’t sleep, had taken to manic scribbling on scraps of paper in an attempt to drain that restless energy from his bones, but these days he was just too exhausted.  Everything he wanted to say, he couldn’t.  He could barely open his mouth without making an even bigger mess of things.

Pete wasn’t sure when exactly he woke up, but the next thing he knew he was sprawled across his couch, still holding the bottle, and there was a face peering down at him.

“You know, for a New York Times bestselling author,” it said, “your apartment is kind of a shithole.”

Pete screamed and fell off the couch.

“What the _fuck?!_ ” he shouted, scrambling to his feet.

There was someone standing in his apartment.  A very pale, ghostly-looking someone, clad in all black save for a red-and-white knit scarf wrapped around its neck and a gray beanie adorning its head, its arms folded over its chest.  Between the raised eyebrow and the tight-lipped frown, it looked, for lack of a better word, very unimpressed.

Pete’s heart might’ve stopped right there, if he hadn’t realized that the ghost’s expression—indeed his very appearance, from his disinterested countenance all the way down to his crossed, skinny jean-clad legs—looked very, very familiar.  He squinted into the darkness and leaned in to get a better look, taking care not to step on any of the discarded notebooks littering the floor.

“ _Gee?_ ” he said, incredulous.

“Took you long enough.”  Gerard rolled his eyes.  At least it seemed to be Gerard, except last Pete checked, Gerard wasn’t fucking  _glow-in-the-dark._  “Seriously, you fucked my brother for two years and now you can’t even say hello?  No wonder no one wants to work with you.”

Too busy trying to process, Pete didn’t even have the mental capacity to feel properly insulted.  “The _fuck_ are you doing in my apartment?  And wha—why the fuck are you _glowing?_   Are you—oh my god,” Pete said, voice growing increasingly more panicked as his anxiety started to kick in, “are you fucking dead?  Is this a haunting?  Are you _haunting me?_ ”

“What?  No, I’m not dead,” said Gerard, with a vaguely offended huff.  “And this isn’t a haunting, either.  Jesus, Pete.”

“Don’t ‘Jesus, Pete’ me!  You’re in my  _fucking apartment,_ Gee!”  Pete pressed his hands against his temples and groaned, closing his eyes.  “Nope.  I’m dreaming.  I’m definitely dreaming.  This is a stress dream.  I forgot to throw the milk out, I drank it like a dumbass, and now I’m having spoiled-milk stress dreams about my ex’s brother because apparently this Christmas Eve wasn’t shitty enough.”

“Actually, your milk’s still in the fridge,” Gerard pointed out, matter-of-fact, “and you haven’t eaten in about twelve hours.”

Both facts, when Pete went over them in his head, were true, which only unsettled him even more.  “You went through my fucking _fridge?_ ”

“ _That_ is irrelevant,” said Gerard, because apparently when you were a fucking ghost (or whatever the fuck he was, since he was apparently quote-unquote “not dead”), personal boundaries meant nothing.  “You asked me what the fuck I was doing in your apartment.  Community service.  Spiritual guidance, whatever the fuck you wanna call it, I don’t care, doesn’t matter.  Point is:  this is an intervention, your life’s fucked up, and you need to get your shit sorted out before it’s too late, whatever that means.”

Too overwhelmed to speak, Pete collapsed onto the couch, wishing he had something to hold other than his bourbon to hold onto.

Gerard’s expression softened, his eyes glowing yellow in the candlelight.  “We’ve been in the same boat for a while now, Pete,” he said.  “I was at the same place you are now, about a year ago.  And I know what it feels like to be scared and hopeless, and to dig yourself so deep that you can’t even see the way out anymore.  But tonight, you’re gonna have three visitors, and they’re gonna show you.  And you’re gonna see a lot of stuff you wished you didn’t have to see again, but trust me—you need this, Pete.  You really, really need this.”

It wasn’t the first time Pete had heard those words:  from his psychiatrist, his friends, his parents, his now-former agent.  But it was the first time he’d heard them spoken so earnestly, from someone who knew as well as he did how easy it was to lose yourself when your entire life revolved around your work, how easy it was to self-destruct when nobody else wanted to care.

“All right,” he said, running a nervous hand through his hair.  “Okay.  When can I expect the first visitor?”

“One o’clock sharp.”  Gerard smiled.  “Don’t be late, Wentz.”

Then he tugged down his beanie, and vanished into the cold.


End file.
